Amid this toil and effort, Jefferson received the invitation to spend several years in France as a commerce commissioner. To a man in love with fresh produce and fine cuisine, the appointment was a godsend, for France in the late 1700s was experiencing a culinary renaissance. The revival had begun the century before, as French chefs moved away from the cookery of the Middle Ages and its reliance on generous dollops of spices and sugar to flavor food. Instead, they turned to stocks and sauces to build layers of flavor, a method that remains the hallmark of classic French cuisine. The new style of cooking skyrocketed to success after being embraced by Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King. Fundamentally, it called for simplicity, but simple dishes could not be served to a monarch. Consequently, meals destined for Louis reflected absurd levels of opulence and abundance. At his palace of Versailles, some 324 servants were devoted solely to preparing the king’s meals, which were spectacular even during the penitential season of Lent. In previous reigns all courses had been served at once, crammed on the table or arranged on a massive pyramidal serving structure. Louis introduced the innovation of distinct courses, one following another. Each course left the kitchen in a grand procession, escorted by forty-eight gentlemen, with the twelve most senior members bearing silver-gilt batons of office. The procession was led from the kitchen building, located across the road from the palace, and wended its way through the many halls and corridors of Versailles before finally reaching Louis, who often dined in his bedroom.6 As a result, virtually all the food arrived at the king’s table tepid, if not stone cold.
Typically, Louis enjoyed six courses at dinner and supper: soup, hors d’oeuvre, entrée, small entrée, roast, and dessert. An entrée could consist of an entire roasted veal rump; a small entrée might be a baked meat pie or grilled fowl. During Lent, fish replaced meat dishes, and the king adopted a penitential diet that included oysters, perch, pike, sole, and salmon. Louis had a hearty appetite, as attested by the Palatine Princess, who described a typical royal meal: “I have very often seen the king eat four plates of different soups, an entire pheasant, a partridge, a large plateful of salad, mutton cut up in its juice with garlic, two good pieces of ham, a plateful of cakes and fruits and jams.” If the king felt peckish during the night, at his door he would find a bottle of mineral water, two bottles of wine, and freshly baked dinner rolls.
The interest in fine food among the French upper class was not limited to its consumption. Louis XV, Louis XIV’s great-grandson, liked to whip up his favorite foods in the kitchens of Versailles. His signature dish was chicken with basil. One of his generals, Charles, Prince de Soubise, was also an accomplished cook, renowned for his rich pheasant-and-partridge-eggs omelet and a dish known as purée Soubise, a kind of risotto made with onion, butter, and rice and served as a sauce with roasted meat.
But not even the wealthiest aristocrats and churchmen, let alone the bourgeoisie, were able to re-create the sumptuous meals of Versailles. The result was a reaction against the culinary excesses of the court and the development of a cuisine that was refined but accessible to all but the king’s most impoverished subjects.
François Marin, author of the cookbook Les Dons de Comus (The Gifts of Comus [the Roman god of revelry]), wrote in 1739 of this “nouvelle cuisine” that had succeeded the over-the-top gastronomic feats in the court of Louis XIV. “Modern cuisine,” he wrote, “established on the foundations of the old one, with less pomp and impediment, although with just as much variety, is simpler and perhaps more complex.” Marin assured his middle-class readers that the aristocracy did not have a monopoly on fine dining. The trick, he said, was to shop daily for the freshest ingredients, to employ a cook who could make a superior bouillon, and to furnish one’s kitchen with the proper pots, pans, and utensils to ensure successful preparation.
In spite of the bourgeoisie’s interest in fine food at a sensible level, extravagant royal menus were still being served during the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, when Jefferson arrived in Paris. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau called for a cuisine even simpler than that advocated by Marin. He urged his readers to give up meat, which he claimed made humankind barbarous, and to dine on milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables. Jefferson, an avid reader of Rousseau, adopted the philosopher’s dietary guidelines. Looking back on a lifetime of eating habits, Jefferson declared in 1819: “I have lived temperately, eating little animal food [i.e., meat], and that … as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.”
Of course, Rousseau’s vegetarian diet appealed to only a tiny portion of French society, but his call for an uncomplicated cuisine resonated widely. Women of the bourgeoisie had already modified the fussy recipes of the court chefs to create dishes that were delicious and refined, yet relatively easy to prepare. This was the style of French cooking that Jefferson would enjoy during his two-year stay in Paris and that James Hemings would study as an apprentice. It was also the forerunner of the French cooking that Julia Child mastered in the 1950s and brought to American home cooks in the 1960s.
It is the rare ambassador, consul, or commerce commissioner who does not travel overseas and return home with some remembrance of service abroad. Still, Jefferson was no souvenir hunter. America was young, raw, and unsophisticated. Whatever was best in Europe, he wanted for his own nation—and that included foodstuffs, recipes, and kitchen utensils. Together with James Hemings, his trusted slave, Jefferson set out to transform America’s palate.
Chapter 1
AMERICANS IN PARIS
Twelve-year-old Patsy Jefferson was dreadfully seasick. Although summer was the best season for an Atlantic crossing and the sea had been, as she described, “smooth as a river,” the movement of the brand-new brig Ceres made her violently ill. While her father enjoyed the days at sea, chatting with the ship’s owner, Nathaniel Tracy, and observing whales and sharks, Patsy spent her days lying in her bunk below deck, rising only to vomit into a bucket.
Jefferson was a man who could never be idle, and so when he was not making polite conversation with Tracy, he spent several hours every day teaching himself Spanish from a grammar book and a copy of Miguel Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote. He would later tell John Quincy Adams that Spanish was such a simple language, he had mastered it in a matter of days. Young Adams was dubious. As he confided to his diary: “Mr. Jefferson tells large stories.”
Jefferson welcomed his appointment as the third American commerce commissioner in France. Only two years earlier his beloved wife, Martha, had died after giving birth to their sixth child, Lucy Elizabeth. Jefferson was overwhelmed by grief. For three weeks, he refused to leave his room. When he finally emerged, he went on long rides into the forest, with Patsy—then ten years old—as his only companion. She would recall later, “On those melancholy rambles I was … a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.”1 A few years overseas would provide Jefferson with a welcome escape from memory-haunted Monticello.
But the Continent would offer more than just a distraction from grief. In addition to securing import commercial relationships for American businesses, Jefferson knew that Europe possessed scientific instruments and useful household devices unavailable in the United States. He was determined to seek out and bring home any advancements that would improve life in rude, rough-hewn America.
Only four days after Congress confirmed Jefferson’s appointment as commerce minister to France (an honor he would share with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams), he set out for Philadelphia, where Patsy was attending school. Jefferson had decided to take his eldest daughter to France. His younger children, six-year-old Mary and two-year-old Lucy, were too young to make a voyage across the Atlantic, so he sent them to live with their aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Francis Eppes, in Eppington, Virginia.
It took the Jeffersons and James a month to travel from Philadelphia to Boston. They took their time, journeying through New Jersey, New York (where they spent a week in New York City), Connecticut, and Rhode Island before finally arrivin
g in Boston on June 18.2 Just before midnight on the Fourth of July, the group boarded the Ceres bound for England. About five the next morning the ship set sail, and on July 26 it docked at the seaport town of West Cowes. Being on solid ground again was a relief to Patsy, but it took time for her to recover fully. Jefferson rented rooms at an inn in nearby Portsmouth so that his daughter could rest and regain her strength. Dr. Thomas Meik, the physician of the Portsmouth garrison, examined the girl, prescribed medication, and sent a nurse; according to Jefferson’s account book, he paid the nurse $2.00 and the apothecary $2.06.3 On July 30, Patsy was well enough to make the last leg of the journey—another sea voyage, this time across the English Channel to Le Havre.4 A violent storm accompanied by torrential rain made the crossing an ordeal for poor Patsy. Once again sick and miserable, she lay down fully dressed on a bunk that she said was more like a box than a bed and tried to sleep.
Immediately upon arriving in France, more troubles ensued. Although Patsy had learned to read French, she could not speak the language and found herself unable to put together a single coherent sentence. Jefferson fared not much better. He had studied French as a young man, but his tutor was a Presbyterian minister with a Scots burr so thick that it mangled proper pronunciation. When Jefferson spoke what he believed to be French, no one could understand him. Fortunately, an Irishman was at the dock and, seeing the Jeffersons’ predicament, stepped in, spoke to the porters, and escorted the Americans to an inn where he arranged for their rooms.5
Adding to Jefferson’s embarrassment, he suspected that the porters were cheating him yet said nothing because, as a Virginia gentleman, he was unable to bring himself to haggle. And then there were the beggars. Jefferson had brought along his phaeton, a four-wheeled two-passenger carriage drawn by two horses, which was driven by James. The Americans’ stylish carriage and well-tailored clothing marked them as well-to-do, so that everywhere they stopped they were surrounded by a pathetic crowd of the hungry and the homeless. Neither Jefferson nor Patsy had seen so many destitute people clamoring for coins, and the sight shocked them. Yet Jefferson dispensed coins every day—a total of six livres and seven sous, about half what it cost him for meals and a night’s lodging for himself, Patsy, and James.6
Although the American travelers found the swarms of beggars appalling, the French countryside delighted father and daughter alike. Virginia was still largely wilderness, so France seemed to the Jeffersons to be one grand, well-tended garden. “Nothing,” Jefferson wrote to James Monroe, “could be more fertile, better cultivated, or more elaborately improved.”7 Patsy was especially taken with the Gothic churches. There were no churches of such size or so richly adorned in America. The soaring arches, sublime altars, the sculptures, paintings, and gold and silver ornaments were unlike anything she had ever experienced in the austere Protestant churches back home. The stained-glass windows in particular enchanted her—they were probably the first she had ever seen.8
On August 6, 1784, after five days on the road, the Jeffersons and James reached Paris. The first thing they would have seen was the new wall surrounding the city, ten feet tall and eighteen miles in circumference. The old massive walls that had protected Paris during the Middle Ages were long gone; the new ones were designed not to fortify the city but to improve its finances. The French government was strapped for cash, a situation made worse by the $40 million that Louis XVI had spent on the American Revolution. Without the medieval ramparts, farmers, tradespeople, and merchants were able to enter and leave the city freely, skirting the tollhouses where they were supposed to pay municipal customs duties. The government could not afford to lose so much revenue, and so it erected a new barrier.
The plan was the brainchild of Antoine Lavoisier, marquis de Condorcet (best remembered today as the chemist who discovered that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen). In the 1780s, Lavoisier was a senior partner in France’s tax-collecting system. Historian Simon Schama notes that the marquis embodied the contradictions of Louis XVI’s France. “Lavoisier,” Schama writes, “was at once pioneering and arcane, intellectually free and institutionally captive, public-spirited but employed by the most notoriously self-interested private corporation.”9 In spite of his scientific credentials, Lavoisier allied himself with the government’s tax police, an army twenty thousand strong whose task it was to ensure that every citizen paid every sou owed to the crown. The result was not only an explosion in smuggling but also the birth of yet another reason to loathe the government of the king.
The wall was designed and erected by the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806). It featured forty-seven gates accompanied by forty-seven tollhouses, all designed in the style of neoclassical temples. In these tollhouses, the customs duties were scrupulously collected.10 Not surprisingly, the wall provoked a storm of protest. When the French Revolution erupted in 1789, both it and the tollhouses were among the targets of the Paris mob.
To enter Paris, the Jeffersons and James rolled across the Bridge of Neuilly, through the Neuilly gate, and then onto the Champs-Elysées. Most Americans in the French capital frequented the Hôtel d’Orléans, and Jefferson directed James to find it. What none among them knew was that the city had two establishments with this name, and Jefferson and his traveling party went to the wrong one.
Paris in the 1700s. This map shows the wall surrounding the city center. The Hôtel d’Orléans on the Left Bank was on rue des Petits-Augustins (present-day rue Bonaparte). Jefferson’s later primary residence, the Hôtel de Langeac, was at the corner of the rue de Berri and the Champs-Elysées.
Jefferson could be excused for such an error: the Hôtel d’Orléans where he rented rooms stood on rue de Richelieu beside the Palais-Royal, a palace owned by the Duke of Orléans, a cousin of Louis XVI. The duke, who dabbled in real-estate speculation, had hired an architect to transform the structure and surrounding area into a combination pleasure garden, restaurant district, and shopping mall. It became one of the most fashionable and popular spots in Paris. Indeed, the author and playwright Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) proclaimed the Palais-Royal “the capital of Paris,” for “there you can see everything, hear everything, learn everything.” Obviously, the city’s social center would attract newcomers like the Jeffersons. But for all the excitement of the neighborhood, they missed the company of other Americans, and so, on August 10, they moved to the other Hôtel d’Orléans, located on the Left Bank.
Jefferson quickly realized that he lacked the wardrobe suitable for a representative of a foreign government. He may have looked like an aristocrat back in Virginia, but among the French elites, dressed in their silk, brocade, and velvet suits, their silver and gold trimmed ruffs, their powdered wigs, and their jewel-encrusted swords, Jefferson looked like a country bumpkin. To make himself more presentable, he purchased a sword, shoe buckles, and lace ruffles for his coats and ordered suits made in the French manner. He also called in a dressmaker, a milliner, and a shoemaker to fashion an entirely new set of clothes and accessories for Patsy.11
Jefferson’s fellow commissioners in Paris were Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. At forty-one, Jefferson was the youngest of the three—Adams was forty-nine years old, and Franklin was seventy-eight. The men had come to know one another well in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, when they were part of the committee appointed by the Continental Congress to write a document explaining to the world the American colonies’ reasons for severing ties with England. There were in fact five men on that committee—the other two were Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York—but when Jefferson had completed his draft of his Declaration of Independence, he showed it only to Franklin and Adams, asking for their suggestions.
Theirs was in many ways an unusual friendship. Jefferson was a member of the Virginia aristocracy and a graduate of the College of William and Mary. Like Adams, he was a lawyer and a farmer, but Jefferson was also a slave owner. He tended to be reserved, whereas Adams, who came from Massachuset
ts Puritan stock and had been Harvard educated, was outspoken and, by temperament, irascible, cranky, and opinionated. Adams feared that when the history of America’s struggle for independence was written, his contributions would be overshadowed by George Washington’s exploits on the battlefield, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and Franklin’s diplomatic successes in France.
And then there was Franklin, a self-made man without a college education who, in his teens, had run away from his parents’ home in Boston to make a new life for himself in Philadelphia. He was a writer, newspaper publisher, printer, postmaster, amateur scientist, and inventor whose creations included the lightning rod, a wood-burning stove, and bifocals. He was also the most amiable of the three. It was thanks to his charm offensive in Paris that France agreed to ally itself with the fledgling United States, virtually guaranteeing an American victory over the British. Franklin had arrived in France in 1776, only months after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. At first, he was America’s unofficial envoy, but once France had sided with America in its revolution, he became a full-fledged ambassador, or minister plenipotentiary, as the post was known at the time.
Franklin had traveled to France determined to be a celebrity. Dressed in a brown homespun suit rather than the silk that was de rigueur among the aristocracy, and sporting a fur cap on his bald head instead of a powdered wig, the American portrayed himself as a simple, honest, down-to-earth Quaker rustic who was amiable and direct when speaking to prince or peasant. From top to bottom, French society was enchanted by the affable Dr. Franklin. He was invited to dinners and salons where the country’s most powerful, most influential men and women gathered. In such crowds Franklin could be witty and flirtatious, but he was never frivolous. In the late 1770s, America needed a military alliance with France, and it was Franklin who secured it. And when in the early 1780s America needed a trade partner, it was Franklin who opened French markets to American goods. He understood that among the proper crowd, the chatter around a dinner table and within a drawing room could be the first step toward forging favorable political alliances or trade agreements. As he confided in his journal: “Great Affairs sometimes take their Rise from small Circumstances.”12
Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee Page 2
